Energy-Efficient Scheduling of Moldable Streaming Computations for the Edge-Cloud Continuum

We consider the problem of cost-effectively mapping a swarm of soft real-time stream processing applications with moldable-parallel tasks to multicore resources in the device-edge-cloud continuum, consisting of mobile devices, edge resources and cloud resources. We leverage flexibility from different parallelization degrees and frequency levels (DVFS) for the tasks, keeping application throughput constraints and communication bandwidth limitations while minimizing overall cost (including device/edge resource energy and cloud resource renting). We present two offline algorithmic solutions with a global view of the environment: an integer linear program (ILP) extending the crown scheduling approach for multi-layer distributed systems and a greedy heuristic algorithm. Our experimental evaluation for several real-world and synthetic scenarios shows that the time required for solving the scheduling problem to cost-optimality by the ILP is feasible for nontrivial scenarios. The heuristic achieves about 12% worse cost efficiency on average, yet operates much faster (by 1-2 orders of magnitude), allowing to scale up the problem size more than the ILP approach.